The finest in snarky analysis of the sorts of things that attract the attention of a New York City-based high-school art teacher with an MA in Critical Theory - who used to pretend to be a cartoonish villain as a gimmick for his hip hop act.

If you see a big difference between "high" and "low" art and culture, this might not be the blog for you.

Monday, July 1, 2013

...but I've ended up in a permanent (let's hope) position at a high school in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and have a lot more to say about art and art education.

As for now, it's my first summer in about a decade in which I don't have to look for work, and I have two months ostensibly "off." During this time, I'll be doing curriculum planning and online assignments for my Advanced Placement students, yes, but I'm also going to give myself some Me Time.

I'm FINALLY writing the actual script for a comic idea that I came up with in collaboration with Kenneth (Max) Brooks, who's got a bunch of stuff on http://adorabledoglings.tumblr.com/ . Scroll way down and look for the words "Sarsen" and/or "Mr. Nice Guy." These are the protagonists of a book called The Straight and Narrow, about two ex-supervillains who are trying really hard to stay on the "good" side even though their world is falling apart, they're getting desperate, and suddenly they know the secret identity of their archrival superhero.

Max pitched this to me a LONG time ago with the single sentence "What if the Riddler and the Penguin discovered that Bruce Wayne is Batman after vowing to never do evil again?" Obviously, we couldn't use those characters (at least, not in canon), but I think we've made characters that can truly matter to readers. I'm thrilled to finally be writing about Tommy and Oskar - they deserve to have their story told.

I'll be writing this script in a month as part of Camp NaNoWriMo (http://campnanowrimo.org) - if you're a) not a spambot and b) actually posting there too, look for me as likethegum!